Home Is Where You Create It

Josephine Pryde’s close-ups of a toddler, in the show “Better Homes” at the SculptureCenter, carry the fraught title “Adoption.”CreditCreditJason Mandella/SculptureCenter

By Karen Rosenberg

May 2, 2013

What is the ideal home?

Is it a glass box in the sky or a split-level on a cul-de-sac? A micro-unit or a McMansion? “Better Homes,” a new exhibition at SculptureCenter, suggests that none of these aspirations may be adequate.

This is not an architecture-and-design show. Blueprints are few, and only three out of the 19 projects look anything like domestic rooms. (The best of them is Anthea Hamilton’s “Kabuki Chefs,” a winking installation that turns tomatoes into Minimalist fetishes in a spotless kitchen.)

Instead, you will find many works that evoke “home” by way of family. The themes are timely: marriage equality, reproductive rights and housing for singles. (Ruba Katrib, the curator of the show and SculptureCenter, cites Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan for micro-apartments.)

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Anthea Hamilton’s “Kabuki Chefs,” a winking installation set in a spotless kitchen.CreditJason Mandella/SculptureCenter

The exhibition offers up so many issues that it is sometimes difficult to see the art on its own terms.

A cornerstone of the show looks back at the notorious French housing projects designed by Le Corbusier. In a short and surprising documentary from 1993, “How Do We Know What Home Looks Like?,” the artist Martha Rosler tours one of his projects, the Unité d’Habitation (Housing Unit) at Firminy, and interviews residents about life there. She finds not only a mausoleum of modernist design — parts of the building that are closed off and in disrepair — but also a thriving community of young families enjoying the ample parks and playgrounds.

Le Corbusier thought he knew what home looked like; we think we know too, but really there is no right answer.

Much depends on definitions of family. Josephine Pryde photographs a pouting toddler in close-ups; the series looks heart-rendingly cute but carries the fraught title “Adoption.” Carissa Rodriguez enlarges laboratory images of sperm donated to her by her boyfriend in a none-too-subtle gesture of biological and artistic appropriation.

Covering similar ground is a much-loved work of the roughly same vintage as Ms. Rosler’s video: Robert Gober’s photolithograph of a page from The New York Times on July 19, 1992, modified to show Mr. Gober as an elegant but wistful bride in a wedding-dress advertisement. The headline reads, “Vatican Condones Discrimination Against Homosexuals.” You could spend a long time in front of this piece, just thinking about what has, and hasn’t, changed since it was made.

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Tamar Guimaraes’s “Canoas,” set in a lushly landscaped house outside Rio de Janeiro.CreditJason Mandella/SculptureCenter

Not everything in the show is so absorbing. There are quick hits like Keith Edmier’s “Adonais,” two models of human hearts cast in basalt and displayed in a silver-lined lead case, and Kirsten Pieroth’s “Two Goblets” (crudely fashioned from the bottoms of plastic bottles). And there are works that look too whimsical and fantastical for such a serious-minded exhibition, like the playfully oversexed E’wao Kagoshima collages and the parade of fabric banners embroidered with cartoonish characters by Gunes Terkol.

Oddly, “Better Homes” doesn’t really address technology in the domestic sphere — for instance, the rise of the alone-together family gathering, with individuals united around a dinner table but distracted by their individual screens. The closest thing to such a statement might be Yuki Kimura’s arrangement of black-and-white interior shots on laminated plywood screens, which apportions the center of the main gallery into semiprivate nooks.

The show does, however, have quite a lot to say about the failed promises of modernist housing. Most of the commentary comes in the form of video: Ms. Rosler’s, and two others installed in SculptureCenter’s musty unfinished basement (which, one hopes, will no longer be used as exhibition space after a renovation, now in its early stages, is finished).

Most compelling is Tamar Guimaraes’s “Canoas,” an upstairs-downstairs drama set in a lushly landscaped house in a Rio de Janeiro suburb (Casa das Canoas, designed in 1953 by Oscar Niemeyer). Shot mainly from a servant’s point of view, it weaves in and out of the owners’ Champagne-soaked soirees and takes in snippets of their conversations about art and politics. It complicates our picture of midcentury modernism, making it look like an upper-class privilege.

Less nuanced, but perhaps more relevant to contemporary urban life, is Neil Baloufa’s video installation “Real Estate.” Here a fast-talking broker leads different potential tenants — gay and straight, single and coupled, old and young — through the same Ikea-bland model apartment, tailoring his pitch to each household. As you listen to it you will be marveling at his hubris: how does he know what home looks like?